Lifeboat Foundation

It’s ten times stronger than steel but is only 5% as dense, and it could revolutionize architecture on Earth, too.

And it’s inspired by X-Men’s Wolverine.

In Brief

• Researchers have created a 3D bulk material from silk fibroin that can be programmed to activate specific tasks when exposed to conditions like temperature or infrared light.
• The material could be used to create everything from hormone-emitting orthopedics to surgical pins that change color when they near their mechanical limits.

Engineers from Tufts University have just created a new, versatile material that could be optimized for a number of purposes, particularly within the medical field. The material was constructed out of special proteins called silk fibroins, and it can be programmed for specific biological, chemical, or mechanical tasks. The study was published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The team used water-based fabrication methods inspired by protein self-assembly to produce 3D bulk materials from silk fibroin. Fibroin, the structural protein that gives silk its durability, was chosen because it allowed for the easiest manipulation of the resulting substance’s form, as well as smoother modification of function. It’s also completely biodegradable.

Continue reading “Biotech Breakthrough: Engineers Made a New Material That Can Be Programmed” »

Breakthrough could be a boon for next-generation MRAM.

Creating tunable terahertz radiation.

Indium arsenide quantum dots in gallium arsenide wafers offer wider pump-wavelength range, significantly higher thermal tolerance, and higher conversion efficiency than typical terahertz radiation sources.

Continue reading “Generating tunable terahertz radiation with a novel quantum dot photoconductive antenna” »

Inspired by the comic book character Wolverine, scientists have developed a self-healing, highly stretchable, transparent material that can be used to power artificial muscles.

The end product is a soft, rubber-like material that’s easy to produce at low cost. It can stretch to 50 times its original length, and can heal itself from a scissor cut in the space of 24 hours at room temperature.

Continue reading “This New Self-Healing, Stretchable Material Is Perfect for Wolverine” »

China makes heaving R&D investments in technologies for telecom and travel industry (namely railway) that reduces China’s dependency on foreign tech companies. Looks like we’re heading more and more into a protectionism world.

China will ramp up investment to develop essential industrial components and materials next year, in a move to reduce reliance on foreign technology in key sectors including telecommunications and railways.

Miao Wei, minister of industry and information technology, said on Monday the ministry will channel more resources to help tackle technological bottlenecks in 20 industrial parts and 15 industrial materials.

Continue reading “China to beef up research of key components” »

For the first time, MIT physicists have observed a highly ordered crystal of electrons in a semiconducting material and documented its melting, much like ice thawing into water. The observations confirm a fundamental phase transition in quantum mechanics that was theoretically proposed more than 80 years ago but not experimentally documented until now.

The team, led by MIT professor of physics Raymond Ashoori and his postdoc Joonho Jang, used a spectroscopy technique developed in Ashoori’s group. The method relies on electron “tunneling,” a quantum mechanical process that allows researchers to inject electrons at precise energies into a system of interest—in this case, a system of electrons trapped in two dimensions. The method uses hundreds of thousands of short electrical pulses to probe a sheet of electrons in a semiconducting material cooled to extremely low temperatures, just above absolute zero.

With their tunneling technique, the researchers shot electrons into the supercooled material to measure the energy states of electrons within the semiconducting sheet. Against a background blur, they detected a sharp spike in the data. After much analysis, they determined that the spike was the precise signal that would be given off from a highly ordered crystal of electrons vibrating in unison.

At the forefront of computing technology for decades, silicon-based chips’ reign may soon end, as today’s chip designers are looking for other materials that offer more options and more amazing abilities than the silicon we all know and love.

This new trend has spurred the guys at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to develop what could be the foundation for multi-role computer chips.

Continue reading “A New Kind of Computer Chip: Silicon May Be Replaced by New Material” »